[192-204] Was it Goethe or Heine? I recall a saying of one of them: only the poor are modest. I renounce all pauper's modesty, since I believe that I shall be able to make a small contribution to the great work of science. This opinion is reinforced in me by the May issue of *Neue Zeit* for 1886, where the deserving Friedrich Engels in his article on Ludwig Feuerbach speaks with approval of my labors.

The year 1848 with its reactionaries, constitutionalists, democrats and socialists awakened in my then youthful soul an irrepressible need to acquire a critically firm, undoubted point of view, a positive opinion as to what, properly speaking, of everything written and heard for and against is undoubtedly and unconditionally true, good and right. Since I very much doubted the existence of God, and felt no faith in the church, it was very difficult for me to sort through all of this. In my search I stumbled upon Ludwig Feuerbach and became acquainted with his teaching; careful study of the latter advanced me greatly. To an even greater degree was my thirst for knowledge satisfied by the *Manifesto of the Communist Party*, which came into my view thanks to newspapers during the Cologne trial of the communists. But most of all I owe my further development, finally—after I had become acquainted with various philosophical scribblers in my isolated rural life—to the book by Marx that appeared in 1859, *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*. In the preface to this book

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